Disk Management with External USB2 Hard Drive

[ray123]

Hello. I am using WinXP pro and I have an external USB2 hard drive which works fine in my computer, and where it was originally initialized. I have been saving various types of data on it. Now I want to save some data on my daughters laptop running WinXP home with the same USB2 external hard drive and when I try to get it to mount via Disk Management, it will not. It has the yellow triangle next to Disk 1, then it says Dynamic, Foreign. But it seems the only thing I can do is convert it to a Basic Disk but it says I would lose all my data. Usually I can import the disk but I cannot. Any suggestions to get this USB2 eternal hard drive recognized in my daughters laptop. thanks

[glc]

You are going to have to convert it to a basic disk. Put it back on your computer, save the data you need, and convert it. There is no way around this that I know of. XP Home cannot work with dynamic disks, only 2K and XP Pro.

[ray123]

So, in the future what should I do to make it more compatible with XP home? Oddly, I just did another 200 gig hard drive and initialized it on my computer and it didn't have any problems mounting on my daughters laptop. I am now moving everything to this 200 gig. I'm not sure what I did different.

[glc]

You have to make sure you don't initialize it as a dynamic disk. It must be basic with a primary partition.